In July 2000, Final Fantasy 9 launched in Japan. As the last PlayStation entry in the series, it featured numerous familiar elements, ranging from magical crystals to black mages with pointed caps. Many players saw the game as a love letter to everything that made Final Fantasy great, and a fitting swan song for Hironobu Sakaguchi before he left Square to found Mistwalker.
Just one year later, Square brought the beloved franchise to PlayStation 2 with the ambitious Final Fantasy 10. The game once again featured frequent nods to past triumphs, while also marking the point when experimentation became more routine within the series.
Final Fantasy 10 introduces Tidus, a famous blitzball player with a dark past. When a huge monster known as Sin destroys the bustling city of Zanarkand, Tidus is hurled into the world of Spira. There, he teams up with a variety of memorable characters, including a summoner named Yuna. The group of uneasy allies journeys the world searching for a way to destroy Sin for good, but that quest requires an unthinkable sacrifice. Knowing there has to be a better way, the companions work together to break a tragic cycle and save Spira, even as their faith and friendship are tested like never before.
At the time of its release, FF10 brought storytelling to a level few players had ever seen. For the first time, central characters were voiced. They cried, yelled, and even laughed. Sometimes, they laughed a lot. Players had certainly developed deep connections with heroes from prior Final Fantasy games, but Square made that process easier than ever before with Final Fantasy 10. The plot credibly explored the depths of characters we loved getting to know, from their noblest virtues to their most persistent prejudices.
The world itself didn’t expand the same way. The sprawling overworld maps from past entries vanished, replaced by more confined set pieces. As a tradeoff, most of those environments were finally presented in 3D, instead of the pre-rendered backgrounds of the series’ PS1 era. As a result, the world – at least the parts of it we got to see – came alive like never before.
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